Wikimedia Foundation Legal department/2023 ToU updates/Office hours/Transcript 1

Community member: As far as I understand, you are trying to change this paid editing stuff so that you can better get rid of these annoying agencies, especially some that are extremely annoying. Because so far, this didn't work out so well. We do not have experience with this new kind of strategy. Do you think that this will work pretty well or use a - well, let's see how it works? What are the chances that it works out?
WMF Legal team: So, I think it is, if I'm being completely transparent, a mixture between the two. I think that after seeing how difficult it is to enforce some of the 2016 changes related to the actual rules of paid editing, we realized that litigation is probably not the first route one could take because of how long it takes to do, how many resources it requires in terms of time, staff costs, etc. And so I think that mediation and arbitration are very well-worn legal territories in terms of how to enforce an agreement.
I think that there are certain people who are obvious and systematic targets that the Foundation already knows, because of community investigations, who are the types of people doing this, who are those we can contact, who are in jurisdictions that we would be the basis for having the Motion to Compel to Mediation. So, I think that there are people who we have in mind, that people. And there are companies that we have in mind already, that we think this would be useful for. I couldn't make the argument that this will be universally useful. Get out of the kind of ideal targets that we have in mind. let's say we're working in a jurisdiction where it's problematic to use the courts. And so imagine that jurisdiction where the court system takes a long time. So we might not be able to compel them into mediation. Let's say that. The court system isn't ineffective. So, even if we get them into mediation, we can't then enforce that through a court order; that is realistic in certain places. But that same thing is also realistic under the current location strategy. And so I think that in terms of our ability to have more options, it's a hundred per cent better than the current scheme than whether or not it will be a silver bullet. I wouldn't necessarily be able to guarantee that.
The other Legal Team member and I are attorneys working at the Foundation, so this meeting is mostly for legal questions. But if you have any questions about the process, feel free to throw them out there.
Community member: By the way, a lawyer and an attorney, is that the same thing or are there minor differences?
WMF Legal team: A lawyer and attorney in the US are just co-equal synonyms.
WMF Facilitator: Yes, this meeting has a legal background. If you have any questions about the process, please feel free to ask.
Community member: Do you know if there are other organizations that tried a similar approach to mediation?
WMF Legal team: The projects are in a very unique place because many commercial platforms, default to arbitration. So for litigation, we found that defaulting to litigation for every dispute is a bit difficult because of the time, energy, resources, and money involved. many organizations just decide to default to private arbitrations for a variety of reasons. We feel that the mediation to arbitration process feels much more humane. It also is less expensive. It also might tend to create better results more quickly. It may be worth noting as well in answer to that question that the situation of undisclosed paid editing on the various Wikipedia projects is probably a little bit different than on most other websites. For example, if you look at Facebook or Twitter, a lot of features, like seen parts of the website, being able to post things actually requires making an account and logging in, and they also collect a lot more information about the people that are making accounts and logging in then the Foundation does. We are pretty strongly committed to not collecting more information about people that we don't otherwise need. So us having a different method to address folks that are abusing that better privacy treatment to engage in types of vandalism or, specifically, in undisclosed paid editing - which is something that wastes a lot of volunteer time - is a route that we think might be effective to address some of those folks. It's probably going to look a little bit different than what a lot of other websites are doing because we are starting from a different position.
WMF Facilitator: Is there a legal precedent in the US or EU for the importance of mediation?
WMF Legal team: There's lots of precedent in the US, in terms of enforcement of mediation settlement agreements and commercial contracts. And so I think that’s definitely something that there's a pretty strong set of precedent for. I think that arbitrations should turn into arbitration or something called the Federal Arbitration Act, which streamlines the process of enforcing arbitration agreements. So I think that there's also a lot of precedent for that. The Federal Arbitration Act was made explicitly to make this process easier for people. So that's also something that we thought would be useful to rely on in terms of turning the mediation to in arbitration today not result in it, negotiate itself settlement. So I think there's a lot of precedent particularly in the US. I think that there are targets all around the world, right? So each jurisdiction will have its own rules about how much we can compel someone into mediation and arbitration, but I think that generally international commercial law is pretty settled on both mediation and arbitration being used as resolution tools.
Community member:. Have you already thought about the process of how the community should report any violations regarding the Terms of Use to request such kind of mediation from you?
WMF Legal team: That's a really good question. And let me clarify to make sure that the general process of how one of these things might look like is clear. There are community investigations across Wiks, English wiki, across all of the different wikis about people who are engaging in undisclosed paid editing. I imagine the vast majority of these are trivial. They are not part of a set of systematic efforts, but every once in a while you find that accounts are all connected together in networks and they're systematically being manipulated by a bigger commercial actor - one of these marketing companies, a reputation management etc. - and so oftentimes, those are surfaced to the Foundation via complaints. The people at the Foundation meeting about these investigations, they find out about this because of other people who are caught up and scams related to these companies come to us privately through email. And so, most of what I see are ways for the community to surface. This information to us is already just doing what the community does, which is nice. There's not necessarily any extra work to be done. I think one of the other useful things about this mediation process is that in mediation, the rules of evidence are not necessarily in effect like they would be in a corporate. That means we can actually use community investigations as persuasive evidence to move any formal action in our favor, which would not necessarily be the case; we might have to do our own investigation if we weren't using the mediation techniques, to directly answer your question now. One of probably the first things that we’ll do if this is supported by the community, we will likely put together a proposal. We will say, here are some things that you can do to support us. We might post on some of the village pump a handful of things that could be useful for you all to surface to us if you do see it on wiki, but I think it'll be relatively informal because most of what we need is already being done, just organically.
WMF Legal team: Answering a Question in the Chat. There are different types of scams. So yeah, one person mentioned one where people would offer to create an article for someone when they actually don't qualify for an article. There are a number of folks that will in various ways represent themselves as having some kind of seniority or authority on Wikipedia and use that to convince someone to pay them to make an article or to help improve the article about them and they can't actually do that. We've also seen some examples of blackmailing people, like, someone will say: “I can get your article deleted on Wikipedia if you don't pay me to keep it.” So there are a few different variations of that kind of thing. I think there's another sort of very strong skin that I don't know. I don’t have proof of it but I think it’s happening. If there are some people who purposely, delete or edit pages and then contact living people in contact with those people to then change those edits back to something more accurate. And there's also sort of broad scam of guaranteeing that someone will get a Wikipedia page and it will be live forever because many people don't actually know how Wikipedia works, if they're not an editor, they only rouse the problem projects in frequently, they might not understand that just because someone promises that they'll put a page up and the page exists for 12 hours, doesn't necessarily mean it will be there forever and many people buy these services thinking that will have some sort of guarantee. And I see that is another kind of pervasive scale, that's definitely. Wikipedia is part of sort of, I think it's actually the first line in terms of people's companies. Interest in reputation management. So, that's definitely something with you.
Community member: You know, I think the very first аре Facebook and similar stuff. We are kind of second line dots.
WMF Legal team: I'll take this since we've mostly focused on the question of this closed paid editing so far. Does that mean at least of folks attending this call that everybody is in universal agreement that upgrading the Creative? Commons license is a great idea and is at least, okay with the fact that we have to follow the the European law. And you know, they are not too worried about how we're doing it. I think it's interesting because some of the more technical aspects of why this is being updated, like the DSA, don't necessarily touch the lives of average users or editors very closely. It's more of a kind of internal process where we have to change a handful of things that we do, but I think the more transparent these things are sometimes - the better.
WMF Legal team: Creative Commons-person, would you like to take the mic for a few minutes and just tell people all the many reasons that you think the upgraded license is much better?
WMF Legal team: Okay, 4.0 is great.
Community member: Thank you.
Creative Commons-person: Sure. Mainly, the 4.0 licenses are designed, first of all, to be more international to better account for all the differences in the laws across various jurisdictions. People who are deeply into a licensed nursery, will know that there is an international version of 3.0. but there are also several international ported versions that better account for various national laws. We tried to integrate those all into the 4.0 upgrade so that there is only one version and it accounts for things like neighboring rights, broadcasting rights, database rights so that there's no uncertainty about how those apply. Also, the language - the language is clearer and simpler all around. There is also a termination provision that gives people 30 days grace to make corrections if there are errors found in attribution and things like that. If you have seen any of the issues with, like copyright trolling related to CC licenses, this helps some of those problems and is similar to provisions that are in a lot of the free software licenses now. I think those are the main things.
WMF Legal team: Thanks.
WMF Legal team: Thank you. And I will say for folks, if you are ever interested in learning more about the Creative Commons licenses and how to encourage folks around the world to put more things under Creative Commons licenses, that is also a really cool way to make new things available for use on Wikipedia and Creative. Commons has lots of resources about how the licenses work and why they're awesome.
WMF Legal team: Alright, let me go ahead and answer the question. So, the law that we are talking about is the European Digital Services Act. It is not a privacy law; it does have some provisions for individual people making requests to remove content, which could be based on them thinking that it is in violation of privacy law. But it is not a privacy law. It is an update to the law about hosting Websites just in general. Previously Europe had a law called the e-commerce Law, if I remember correctly, and if there are Europeans who know this better than I do, feel free to correct me on this. But if I remember correctly, Europe has two different kinds of EU-wide laws. One is kind of a guideline where there are sets of rules that every EU country is supposed to put into their own law. But each country gets to decide how they do it. And the other one are rules that are the same for all of the EU countries. I see you're wearing thumbs up, being that so that is about right? So the Digital Services Act is in the latter category. This is an update to the laws around hosting websites, and they're trying to make a uniform set of rules that everybody that provides services to Europe has to follow. And I would emphasize that it is everybody that provides services. They wrote it in a really broad way. Normally, the way you decide if a law applies or not is you look at the physical location of the headquarters of the company. And so the fact that we're following the Digital Services Act, for example, does not mean that every law in every EU country now applies to the Wikimedia Foundation. Most laws in most countries are based on where the headquarters of the company is, and the Foundation’s headquarters are still in the United States, but the Digital Services Act specifically was written to say that it applies to anyone that provides services to a substantial number of Europeans, no matter where the company is located. And so it is very intentionally designed to apply to the Wikimedia foundation. As well as sort of like any American corporation that is hosting a website used by people in Europe,
WMF Legal team: That is why we think that it applies to us and that we need to follow it since we want to continue offering services to lots of people in Europe. The requirements around it are actually mostly procedural. That's why you're seeing a lot of terms of use updates around it because the terms of use are all about kind of outlining how the use of the websites works. And so it's that we've added a bunch of stuff that says, like, If you have a complaint here's how you can submit your complaint, and here's how we'll handle your complaint. And here are some of the things that might happen in response to your complaint in a kind of general way. Like, we're not going to repeat the entire set of all possible actions the Foundation can take in the Terms of Use. Instead, we outline that in separate policies, but the idea in the ToU is to let people know. Like, you can submit a complaint to us, we will accept it under this law, and it should follow the requirements of this law. So that's the point of doing the ToU update and why the law requires it.
WMF Legal team: I think it is an interesting approach to regulation. I think the observation that it is not something that is in a lot of countries in the world is actually a really interesting one because it probably would be the case that if every country in the world tried to pass a law like this, a bunch of them would contradict each other and and you'd actually have a problem where you couldn't follow all the different laws. Some of them might violate people's human rights depending on where they were coming from and what they were demanding. And so that would actually be problematic. I think the European Union is able to successfully have a law like the Digital Services Act, probably for two reasons. One, it is a very large and significant part of the world, and they have enough power globally to dictate that the people follow their rules. Number two, the law that they have actually put out there is actually a pretty good one. I think the Digital Services Act is a very well written law. It's not perfect, but it's pretty well written and we are we are implementing it in a way that we think is going to be protective of the communities. It's going to allow communities to continue to be the people that resolve problems and handle project governance and we don't think it will interfere with that. Maybe in a tiny number of cases, we'll get a complaint that the community didn’t resolve properly or a court ruling against us. When we say that we think the community resolved it properly, it will have to do something else. But I think that will be really, really small in number. And it is overall a law that seems to be respectful of different types of websites and respectful of the human rights of people using websites and contributing to websites in a way. That is pretty good. I think if it were more poorly written, you might see us maybe like challenging parts of it instead of complying with all of it. And if we see laws in other parts of the world that we think would put editors in danger, we're not so much going to comply with it as we are going to try to file a legal challenge against it, or find a way to comply only with the parts that don't endanger people and and try to navigate that situation.
00:25:00
WMF Facilitator: We have general comments as well.
Community member: So, a couple of days ago, I think in Russia, the Foundation was punished and has to pay two million rubles or something because they didn't delete an article, and I guess mediation won't do anything or wait. Maybe you won't delete the article, maybe you pay. It's an official statement already.
WMF Legal team: Did you want to discuss the Russia?
WMF Legal team: I didn't quite follow that question.
WMF Legal team: Can you set up? And again, I'm sorry.
Community member: Well it actually doesn't matter that much. The actual question is about the new European law. And I've heard that while they were making this law, the war in Ukraine broke out and then they changed some parts of the law, and they basically said if you're spreading a lot of lies about the government or something then you have to put it down. Something like this. I don't know the exact wording and this might have an effect on Wikipedia. If we say this part of Ukraine is just a region. Here is a part of Ukraine and she says, but it is a part of Russia, you're lying here, something like this.
WMF Legal team: There are two parts of the Digital Services Act that could impact Wikipedia. One that I think would be fairly easily handled by the community, and one that would hopefully be extremely rare. Maybe never applied to Wikipedia. So, the one that would be handled by the community is what we are supposed to do. The foundation is supposed to do an annual risk assessment. We're supposed to look at the projects and all the websites that we're hosting and try to see if there are risks that are happening. And if there was something that was actively spreading disinformation about Ukraine, and, or maybe specifically about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, that could be something that we notice and identify as a risk. And the law doesn't say, okay, now the foundation has to come in and fix it all. It’s just that we have to identify those risks and come up with a reasonable plan to address them.
WMF Legal team: I feel like at least as a first pass, unless we get sued by a regulator over this, our first pass would probably be to if we found a risk like that we would want to share it with the communities, let people know where we found the problem, as specifically as we could, and then hope that they're that there are communities that can address that problem. And, you know, maybe if there's problem with the community, like if there's a project capture kind of thing that's probably going to be the toughest one to deal with, but my hope is that most projects are something that can be handled by just bringing attention to it and getting more editors to work on a problem. Because I think that does tend to resolve things in most languages.
WMF Legal team: If it is really a stickier problem then maybe we'll have to think about other things, like maybe different types of community-building efforts or figuring out why there is a problem and trying to address that with the people involved in some way. But I feel like it gets progressively more rare; the bigger the intervention, the progressively more rare it gets, and I think the likelihood is that most risks that we identify are things that we can just bring to the attention of the editor communities. And people can either kind of address specific articles or maybe update policies on some of these topics.
WMF Legal team: The second one, that did come up after the war started, was the sort of crisis protocol that the European Union has. And it says that they are allowed in a crisis to ask websites to just things, to just deal with the crisis for some reason. I don't really see that one applying to Wikipedia very often, if ever. I really think what they were thinking about was - if there is a viral video on Facebook with a mass shooting or a bunch of disinformation that is going out to millions of people really quickly that they could contact Facebook and say: delete this video. Just get it off the platform. Something really bad is happening right now and we order you to fix it. And Wikipedia doesn't really work that way. Even if someone puts this info in a Wikipedia article it's like in one article and in one language, in most cases, and it's something that someone could just go in and edit if there was really a problem. And so, the idea that there would be some kind of crisis where it would be critical for Wikipedia to be rapidly changed, I struggle to imagine that scenario. It just seems extremely unlikely to me that that would ever come up. If it did come up, I hope it would come up in a way that was extremely clear and where there wouldn't be any concern at that point of intervention.
00:30:00
Community member: I think there would be technical possibilities to abuse wiki data to put misinformation in a lot of articles at once. but, Let's assume it doesn't happen.
WMF Legal team: Interesting.
WMF Legal team: I feel like that would be unlikely and that's probably something not a lot of people know about, but maybe that could be an example. Like if someone puts something really problematic in Wikidata and we are alerted to it as part of an emergency. Maybe the foundation would be asked to rapidly change that. I think if we were ever asked to do that, if the law were invoked in that way, we would try to be as transparent as possible. If we made some kind of rapid change like that, we would say to the communities: Hey, we did this. Here's why we did this. We've made this change, we were ordered to do it. You should now look at it and try to make it better because probably the kind of change they would demand of us would just be a complete deletion and then we can tell people, you can recreate this, but you know, here's why it was deleted. Please be careful now that you know it's not a misinfo again or something.
WMF Legal team: I just wanted to say that I appreciate everybody attending this and everyone who's been participating on the ToU discussion page. Because I think that the conversation is really healthy. It's been really useful for us to see how people feel about certain terms and I think it's also been helpful just with minor typographical edits and making sure that this is as clear as possible before we go live.
WMF Legal team: It takes a lot of work to have a really healthy conversation.
Community member: Yeah, making new rules and guidelines and policies, or training them is always difficult. You think is completely through. And then, in reality, something happens that you never had thought about, and then your rules are annoying.
WMF Legal team: Right. Which is I think a good reason why it's being tested by so many people reading it and providing us with comments and really making us consider every aspect of the changes.
Community member: I've another question regarding this mediation. I've recently discussed with Germany if it's possible to take legal action against some globally banned users who are still abusing Wikipedia after many years, and I thought if it's possible to do something similar with this marketing mediation thing.
WMF Legal team: Okay, no worries. Yes. So I think that it's interesting. I think we really want to avoid both perception and an actual act of working against specific individuals. I think that that is a much thornier question than working to enforce rules against commercial entities that are intentionally and systematically violating rules. And so, someone who might be globally blocked, I think, is probably globally blocked for a very good reason. I think that it's unclear what someone could do beyond their block to create more problems, but I think that we want to keep things centered around companies for now. Moreover, it's much harder to legally enforce anything against an individual. And so companies have lots of money and reputation to lose. I mean, some of these companies that do this type of undisclosed paid editing work are small organizations, but some of them are very large public relations companies that do actually have lawyers who tell them whether or not they should do something. And so I think those are the current best targets. If this is something that seems effective at solving problems with undisclosed paid editing, we will always be open in the future for the community to suggest extensions of this to other specific rules. But I think that for a variety of practical reasons and a variety of legal reasons, we want to stick to Companies engaging in systematic issues.
WMF Facilitator: I'm going to say this again. If anyone hasn’t yet participated in the conversation, please free to do so. There are no dumb questions.
Community member: The other community member probably thought not only about globally blocked users. He probably thought about the WMF-banned users, and you guys probably know much better than we who you ban, and you tend to not share the details for obvious reasons. Maybe this is not true for some of these cases. I have some details and I understand that you don't share the details publicly, but some of these guys return with new accounts and now you could think about maybe you could solve this problem as well. When there's a problem. I mean, I don't know many details about those guys.
WMF Legal team: I think there's going to be a year of experimentation. I think that - assuming that this language is approved and we actually go about doing this - we have several targets already in mind as the first people to probably engage with and potentially take formal actions against, but all of that will be a huge learning experience. I mean, every time we work in a different jurisdiction, every time we work with a different size of the company, we're going to be learning new things. At the end of that learning process we decide, hey, this could really work with individual bad actors. And maybe in the future consultations, we might ask whether or not this is something that community wanted. I think it would be a bit premature because we don't have enough information about how effective this is. We don't have enough information about how long it will take. We know that in the specific contexts that we've already envisioned. Yes, I think this would be pretty effective, but outside of those contexts who knows how effective it would be.
WMF Legal team: I'm not sure the message in the chat is a question, but just to bring that out into the discussion for transcript purposes. I do think project capture is probably one of the toughest things that Wikipedia can experience. And obviously there is that risk with a small language where if the language is small enough, and there aren't that many editors, it is possible for a group with a specific ideological viewpoint to become the majority and the functionaries for that project and chase everybody else off of it. I don't think we have a good answer for what to do about that, honestly.
WMF Legal team: I think Croatian project is probably in sort of a stable state. Like, I'm not sure that there would be a legal obligation for us to do anything about it specifically, but I guess we'll see under the Digital Services Act if that is something that gets evaluated as a risk, But if it happens in a different language, or if it happens on, say, a particular topic that is important or related to some new crisis or an existing crisis, those are the possibilities.
WMF Legal team: Is there a way to get more people involved? Just to get a bunch more editors in that language and try to grow the project despite the group of people that are trying to prevent that? And if that's not possible, then maybe there are ways to try to reset the project in some form, which I know in the case of Croatian has been something that has been talked about on and off and not done for years, because it would be such a massive step. And I don't think it would be a step that the Foundation could just take. It probably would be something that we would need to discuss broadly with multiple cross-Wiki groups, not just the language. But maybe also talking with global functionaries. Maybe functionaries, across several similar languages to see if there's some kind of plan we could all agree on, that would be how I would approach it. I would actually say in some ways - and this is obviously a little bit my perspective as a foundation staffer - but in some ways, I view the Digital Services act as a helpful law in that regard, because it takes a problem that nobody can quite agree what to do about and puts it into a legal context, where it says, you've identified this problem, now you need to come up with a plan to try and do something about it.
WMF Legal team: Not to overstate the value that I find in the new enforcement techniques on paid editing, but I do think they do relate somewhat to disinformation. For example, some of these larger, PR firms and marketing companies are hired by state actors and are franchised out to do this type of work. And so it's just another tool to at least potentially deal with some of the commercial sides of that type of activity, not to say that this is actually true disinformation tool, but it is something that overlaps with that type of work.
WMF Facilitator: Just a reminder. We're going to close the meeting in 40 minutes. So please, if you have any question regarding other aspects of the discussion, please.
Community member: I have a question. When you talk about paid editing, how do you define it? Is an employee of a chapter or of the WMF or an affiliate considered a paid editor when they're editing Wikipedia?
WMF Legal team: This is something that we want to make very explicit and so we are talking about a very specific thing. We're talking about undisclosed advocacy paid editing. This is the type of thing that commercial firms do; so contrast that with people who work for a chapter, people who volunteer at a user group, these people might have gotten a grant from the organization. These people often have disclosure requirements, right? So, if I'm Wikipedian in residence, I should say that I'm really Wikimedian in residence when I'm hosting, but I think that those things are already disclosed and we really don't want anyone who's in one of those positions, for example like a Wikipedian in residence, to feel like this will affect them. This is particularly geared towards companies that are intentionally not disclosing their work which is done highly systematically for commercial gain. Not because they've done it, and certainly not because they just neglected some rules, right? They are doing this purposely to mislead people or to engage in scams.
Community member: So one point in the changes was that you mentioned the UCoC somewhere, and I think it says that there should be some type of easily available button, “click here to get help”, “click here to report misbehavior”, or something like that. But now it says something “click on the left side” or on help or so. But I think this is based on the new law now.
Community member: So, it's just a coincidence that they basically recite the same thing.
WMF Legal team: Oh the new reporting; help reporting kind of thing. I think that is actually a coincidence.
We will probably check with them as they work on developing new types of reporting to see if they've got a tool already designed and we can propose a couple of tweaks to make it line up really closely with the legal requirements that we have or better comply with the legal requirements. We will probably suggest that to them. But my understanding is that just happened to line up timewise. It was not prompted by the law.
Community member: How much time to stick log if for the foundation to fix this? I mean, it seems like there is no tool so far to handle this.
WMF Legal team: There are probably two parts of that. I think we are probably going to accept most reporting under the law through email. We already have several email addresses, like legal at Wikimedia.org, where people can let us know if they have a formal legal notice they want to send us. That probably satisfies the law’s reporting requirements. There's some debate in the interpretation of the law right now about how clear and obvious it needs to be when someone is just browsing the website that they can report problem. I think that, currently, having an email address that people can find by clicking through a link is enough. However, if there's disagreement about that we may need to change it in the future since that’s ambiguous; there probably isn't a distinct timeline for that. It's it's the kind of timeline that sort of like we're fine until we receive a regulatory complaint that we're not fine. And then, based on that complaint, we will get a timeline for when we have to fix it. Or we may dispute the complaints, and that may actually take months or even years, depending on the dispute. So, I would say that one isn't the most urgent change, and they can probably do the tool development at the normal speed.
WMF Legal team: The law, overall, is probably going to start being in application to us some time at the end of this summer, 2023. The exact date isn't known yet. I think or it's sort of estimated right now because the European Commission just gave out a bunch of extensions, including to Wikimedia. We didn't actually ask for one but they extended a bunch of the big tech companies, so they offered us one, just to be fair. So I think that means that probably like the end of summer beginning of fall is when the law will actually start being applicable.
Please correct me.
No, no correction at all. And hi everybody. I'm so sorry I joined late. I'm working with other members of the Legal team on the DSA project in particular. I just want to fly on the question and the observation that’s being raised, and about sort of getting in touch with problems. There is a separate issue that we're looking at, which is the number of times either we or one of the chapters are being sued or investigations are being launched by national regulators, for example, in the privacy space, against us. And it is the first time that we hear about the complaint when they come and say, why have you not deleted this page or this user account or something like that? And chapters are being sued, even though they have no formal role in what contents are Wikipedia, so that's obviously not ideal either. Some of the things that we’re discussing are also an opportunity for looking again at what are the best ways that we can root people? To resolve their complaint and ideally resolve it within the community first. But there is an escalation path which is the Foundation and not chapters or individual agents threatening to sue them so that we end up being the last resort before things go to court, before things go to the regulator. Because once they're there, it becomes a lot more awkward to solve.
WMF Legal team: Well, I just note, for example, that a lot of the different Wikipedias have quite different impression pages. On Spanish, for example, it is quite difficult to find any point of contact, at least when I've looked at these sorts of things which can lead to some of these issues; it's actually an idea I have in mind for a Wikimania session later this year where we could talk about what are the factors that lead to some chapters getting individually sued or complained about, or receiving these kinds of complaints.
Community member: Nice.
WMF Legal team: So, how do we avoid other parts of the movement getting sued and make sure it's just the Foundation that's the one that plays that role…
WMF Facilitator: I'm just going to mention a community member’s comments that the current feedback on Meta is mostly positive.
I asked people if they find a specific trouble with these proposed changes and want to raise a question here…
WMF Legal team: The positive feedback is not just the excellent work that members of the Legal team are doing on this, which is really, really remarkable. But actually, it comes down to the first few people who left comments from the community in a very positive and constructive way. And I think once you set the tone, it's a lot easier for other people to come to the page with that mindset and express themselves in a very respectful way rather than getting whipped up. So I think that's probably somewhat due to the trend setters amongst you.
WMF Legal team: Well, I don't have a lot more to add, honestly, if there aren't any more questions. We did kind of a review of the European law, and the other Legal team member gave us a presentation on the copyright changes and why they're awesome. We talked about the undisclosed paid editing and mediation changes, and we talked at least a little bit about some of the other details. Is there anything anybody wants to add that we haven't already gone over, at least a little bit?
WMF Legal team: One thing that might be a bit of a can of worms that I'll open anyway, because I'd like the feedback from others, is about translations of the final Terms. So, currently, we plan on translating the Terms into a variety of languages, possibly six, seven, eight, even more than that.
00:55:00
WMF Legal team: So far, the idea is, for any language we don't make an official translation to, we would encourage communities to translate it. But are there any languages that you all represent where machine translation isn't a viable solution? One of the languages I can use as an example is Catalan, which is very difficult, apparently, to machine translate because there's just not enough interest in creating an algorithm for that. So, does anyone have any particular interest in any specific language that might otherwise have a barrier to machine translation or community translation?
WMF Legal team: I will consider that a possible no.
Community member: Well, I’m from a big language and I just put a link in the chat where someone proposed a different definition of paid editing. The definition is that you get any hook with compensation of any kind. And it was especially this member of the Legal team who was interested in that, right? Just want to mention, if you couldn't consider it as paid editing if you get any kind of compensation, then when my girlfriend offers me a kiss for writing an article, this would be… Yeah. So this is maybe a bit too much but just mentioning.
WMF Legal team: I think that I would tend to shy away from that for several reasons. Number one, the communities, at the end of the day, make their own internal rules that we want to respect. And so if a community says that, "as long as you disclose, then paid editing it's allowed," then that seems like it should be allowed via the Terms of Use. So that's the first thing. I don't think that these terms of use should then start subverting local community rules. Right? The more important thing is at the higher level of what the Foundation actually wants to do with this is we want to stop problems. And at the end of the day, someone trading a cup of coffee for help getting rid of something on Wikipedia when wiki text is too hard for their friend to understand, that is not a problem; that is not a good use of donor funds to investigate. I think that, fundamentally, we are dealing with people who have extremely negative intentions, who are not here to create an encyclopedia, who are intentionally here to take value away from the community rather than put it into the community. And so, we're not talking about individual actors. We're talking about commercial entities, we're talking about people who shouldn't be here in the first place, not people who inadvertently violate rules, or people who didn't even violate community rules. So, I think that, although the kind of feeling that comes from these suggestions is going to be taken into consideration. I don't think that there's any chance that we would act in a way that completely blocks people from, I mean, just waking medium and residences. Because I think that's not what we're doing. And that's not what this is intended to do.
WMF Legal team: And that's interesting, [WMF Facilitator] because the idea that any form of compensation on Spanish Wikipedia, it would be penalized I think that, even though that is a local rule, at the higher level of what does the Foundation believe that it needs to enforce. Again, it is people who are intentionally bad actors who are specifically not disclosing. Because at the end of the day, disclosure is the thing that allows people to decide whether they want to trust the information enough to reinvestigate it, edit it, etc. And so if Spanish Wikipedia wants to ban everyone who gets coffee for editing sent via but that would not likely be a way that we would look at enforcement of these rules through specifically through mediation.
01:00:00
Community member: Are you aware that the Foundation’spPrivacy policy sSometimes collides of the anti-paid editing policies.
WMF Legal team: ah, I would be interested in you saying more about ways that you believe that it might collide. But I think generally the two things can be reconciled myself. But yeah, let me know in what ways you feel like they might get it out.
Community member: So, there's two cases. So one, instead of to connect it to don't publish any high piece after you do a checkuser request. And some, by the way, I'm a German checkuser. Yeah. So I sometimes see this paid editor, use these five accounts, and these 10 IPs. And with these centerpiece, they're also created two articles. But then I’m not allowed to publicly tell them. By the way, it's decent these articles because then they know it's from these IPs and they're not a lot to make these public. So I cannot tell my community. By the way. These objects have a closer look at them. They are not neutral content in there or something like this. I cannot tell them.
WMF Legal team: Right? Because we don't want to out people necessarily.
Community member: Yeah. I mean I understand both perspectives…
WMF Legal team: [WMG Legal Team member],, did you want to add some?
Community member: but I don't see a good solution to the problem, then that's the other thing is, when you use Google to make the connections that this totally anonymous account is actually run by this agency. Sometimes, they don't leave enough information in Wikipedia but somewhere else, and then you can make the connection and there has been action. And a German checkuser request that the Ombuds commission until we end. Because the guy who requests the checkuser request said here on the Internet, some externally not only Wikipedia page. I found the connection that this account is getting paid and this was in considered as non-public private information and had to be removed. Yeah.
WMF Legal team: That's interesting.
WMF Legal team: No. Oh no that I mean this particular aspect of the problem like I think you'll probably hear from Foundation lawyers I'm gonna guess that [WMF Legal Team member]'s answer a little bit but I think you'll probably hear from Foundation lawyers that this is not actually like a problem with privacy law, there's not like that like doing a Google search and finding someone's public profile and talking about it is not actually private information as far as the law is concerned. Local policies have been more strict about this than the law on a lot of languages for a long time.
WMF Legal team: I think we actually got some like I was part of a comment from the Foundation Legal Department, some years ago. Now, I think back in like 2016 where we talked about making some of these connections in the context of undisclosed paid editing, and we thought it was okay. And some people were actually quite upset about that. So there really is quite a range of opinions.
WMF Legal team: I think for my perspective, when I hear someone like you describing this problem, it seems to me like you ought to be able to share that information in order to address the problem. But I also want to acknowledge that there are a lot of people on the various Wikipedia projects that don't feel that way, and would prefer that there is not the connection made to off wiki activity either because they are worried about it being expanded in a way that they're concerned about or maybe they are trying to engage in some activity that they don't want connected to them. For good reason or for bad reason, in some cases and so I think like I don't think we've necessarily addressed that problem. I think it is something to think about as folks are going forward in terms of like should these policies, like if these problems are ongoing, should these policies be amended in some ways to make exceptions for undisclosed paid editing issues? I do also think this could be the kind of thing to report to the Foundation so it's like if you know about a problem and local policies mean that you can't fully explain the problem to everybody, but you see that there is this group of multiple connected accounts, IP addresses, send that to us and maybe that's a good candidate for us to try to trace back to some, like marketing company that's controlling all these accounts and see if we can bring a claim against them or get them to disclose their accounts as we are asking under the terms of use and then that can be something that we share with the community, so that it's a more open thing in that way. [WMF Legal Team member], anything you want to add to that?
01:05:00
Community member: So just answering some questions in the chat is for this IP masking tool that is coming soon soon for many years.It's coming soon and you so the privacy policy from the Foundation says that either checkuser when I have the eyepiece I only have a lot to share of other checkusers. And the masking tool is so is it the US? It's planned right now would be allow every admin to see the IPs so I cannot I still cannot share it because admins are not under the policy. So this would be a tool but the Foundation could say we share the true IP only for checkusers are not for every admin. It would be helpful in discuss that we're discussing right now. What would be worsening? Other cases a lot. Another possibility, is what you were even allowed to edit? Where IP just force everyone to have an account, problem solved causes other problems. Yeah. Just mentioning the options that are possible, and, there's also a local checkuser policy. That it says when I did the check and a lot of I'm not allowed to block the IPs, I have to tell someone else to block it. But this is a kind of an open problem.
WMF Legal team: Yes. Yes, I I heard about the case. I think it was last year that came to that problem where people were telling admins to block certain IPs and that was that was considered a problem. One of the ombuds cases I think.
Community member: Yeah.
WMF Legal team: There's potentially several different ways to address that and I think the privacy team has been handling that one in kind of like long slow way like trying to reach out to folks who are on the individual language projects and try to come up with a solution that everybody's happy with.
WMF Legal team: Yeah, that one that was pretty. I'm not gonna wait into what the right way to solve that problem is because it's a particularly tricky one. Especially because like the question of how IP addresses are treated as personal information is something that I think changed over time and now is pretty universally accepted in most countries. That IP addresses are personal information, and so, they have to be handled that way.
01:10:00
WMF Legal team: I think this is an area that is right for improvement though, and probably for improvements separate from the terms of use. So, like the terms of use cannot cover all of this, but the ANPDP, the access to non-public information. Again, you know what? It's called ANPDP and I can't remember what the the acronym stands for myself at the moment. But at any rate, the access to non-public information policy and the privacy policy, I think are both like open to improvements on that front. And we did, we recently made an amendment that allows for special use exceptions to the disclosures. So if there's a specific reason to do that, we can review that and try to put that in. And I believe the privacy team is looking at doing sort of a more broad privacy policy update in the next two years. Don't quote me on that. That is not a lot, that is not set in stone, but I think sometime over the next two years, they're looking at considering a broader privacy policy update where maybe some of these changes can be included in doing that.
WMF Facilitator: Alright folks, we are approaching the end of our conversation. We have only 10 minutes of the 90 min left.
WMF Legal team: Oh, interesting comments right at the end here by [Community member]. That will. So we wouldn't publish guidance about the attribution in the terms of use, but I would say, first of all, I would encourage community members who are familiar with this to publish, like, essays about the topic. I think there's a lot of people that are very good at, like, CC license attribution and may have lots of helpful thoughts. I'm also going to take that topic as a potential research assignment for Foundation staff. Are we have like rotating semester legal fellows that we often have do legal research and writing about like, how to do attribution under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, and maybe even specifically for academic journals, could be something that we do as an article on the wiki legal space on Meta-wiki. So, don't expect it for some months but I will take that as a low priority legal research project for us to try to get an educational article out about
Community member: Yeah, thank you. Okay, I went through the content page for the terms of use, and I'm seeing it for the first time. So I'm wondering how we know new editors will see this policy. It's a very important policy. I remember, when I joined I got different kinds of links. I never remembered seeing anything like this, like this terms of use, and I'm seeing quite a lot of information, that is very important for editors, especially new editors. And sometimes while editing, you know, one of the things we have in mind is to do the right thing to put the right information on projects, and most time, where we put these information, new editors might not know if they are breaking the law for the subject or no, there was time to do the right thing. So it's important. Everybody's aware of these terms of use. No. So when you are editing you're doing the right thing. I didn't join when the meeting started, so I don't know if this has been mentioned, about the editors that were killed because of editing or something, so I believe it more. It was aware that, okay, you are responsible for, whatever you put in there, then we can know the kinds of things. And that I want to talk about it editing. Sometimes, while editing, I started editing on mission to be there before I moved to the language. Wikipedia, what do we do? When you are accused of paid editing words, you're not paid. For instance, I went through the contact page. I saw that there should be a statement maybe on the talk, that's okay. And this subject made me, you know? But if that's if that statement is not on the talk, I believe enough for reviewers or admins to know that you are not paid. So, what should editors do when accused of paid-editing and you are not paid for editing? That's all for creating the content. Thank you.
01:15:00
WMF Legal team: Oh [WMF Legal Team member], maybe you can talk about the visibility of the terms of use first and then I'll talk about the second portion.
WMF Legal team: Sure. Yeah, so in terms of visibility, I think, there. I mean there's a couple places the terms of use are visible now. So one is that at the bottom of almost every page there is a footer that links to the terms of use as part of legal terms, and all when people are going to edit, there is like a link to the terms of use where you are, where you are editing. So like it'll say it's in small print but it'll say like when you're making an edit that you should follow the terms of use. I think it's an interesting question. How something like the terms of use would be integrated into a new editor experience?
WMF Legal team: I suspect if you asked a product designer about this, they would say that it's too large of a document to show to a new editor. Like it would be overwhelming to someone who is just starting out to see this for the first time and need to read through it before they could do an edit. There are probably ways though to, like, flags certain things to people to like, say to people, like be aware, you're responsible for what you're writing or be careful if you're writing about a living person and things like that as part of a new editor experience. That's something. I am totally blanking on what team is working on this at the Foundation, so somebody helped fill me in. But there is like a new editor experience project that the Foundation is actually being working on to help give people who are just starting out on Wikipedia a little bit more help than they've been getting in the past. And so something like letting them know that you see some of these aspects of like what's in the terms of use as things that new editors should know. I think would be really helpful feedback for that team and there's probably ways that they could make it easier for someone new to learn that information without having to reach through the entire long document. As for the portion that you were talking about accused of being a paid editor, even though you were not, number one, I think it's important to know that disclosure requirements or the community's rules as opposed to something that we would enforce under these mediation terms. But I think that for experienced editors, because there are so many people who do not disclose, they're willing to accuse someone of paid editing unless they have very strong evidence against. I mean, to support that assumption. And so I don't know if there's anything with the terms themselves can do things, but I do think that an increase amount of enforcement against people, who are not disclosing will create more disclosure and it may influence people to make the benefit of doubt seriously. If someone doesn't have a disclosure that means they are not paid editor, I don't know if that will happen overnight, it definitely will not, but every little thing counts in terms of our enforcement strategy.
WMF Legal team: And there was a question. I think the hand went up.
WMF Facilitator: Is [Community member] the question.
Community member: You hear me?
WMF Legal team: Oh, you're a little bit low, but yes, I can hear you.
Community member: Okay, now It was true to respond to [WMF Legal Team member] saying that, obviously, there are things that new editors should know, but from my experience, giving workshops to new editors, they have so many things to learn already, the five founding principles, and not able to grasp. Once even the admissibility, you know, notability criteria. You know, you have to tell them again and again and it's it's there's a lot of information. and I think parts of the problem is that you can't find the information. That's what was said before like for example, during the pandemia were confronted with a lot of people who were stressed and had mental health issues and there's no easy, reachable content page that you can reach out if you have a problem. So, I don't know if there could be a way of having all these important things visible everywhere, on every page, Because that's that's part of the problem with this, a lot of information flowing everywhere. And some of us are not even aware of what we should put in other legal implications.
01:20:00
WMF Legal team: I think my answer to that point of feedback is similar to the last terms. I think we can definitely make the growth team aware of this. I think the point about people not being able to find the information again. After they've heard it is actually a really important one.
WMF Legal team: Yeah, it feels to me like a little bit of a longer term thing, but I can certainly imagine something that is maybe even like a new editor interface that people have that has a lot of these sorts of pieces of information. So I think this is something to pass along to the growth team and maybe it will help them as they continue to improve how people start editing Wikipedia.
WMF Legal team: We're down to the last few minutes, okay?
Community member: Also the thing about giving persons, when you tell to a newbie they shouldn't write about living person. A lot of them come and say they want to write about somebody they think is famous. Absolutely. And I know that for trans persons and for descendants in France, sometimes there are problems because the pages are being edited, very negatively and for me, it took a long time to realize that writing on living persons was a responsibility to and something tricky. And it's just one of the whole lot of information that people we tell them that before they grasp, why or understand why they need to become more experienced editors to understand all these aspects. That's the complexity of our movement.
WMF Legal team: And I do really appreciate you shepherding people through this process: because it, it is kind of integral to what we do.
WMF Legal team: I think we are just about at time. Now, [WMF Facilitator] over to close this out.
WMF Facilitator: Just thank you. It was really interesting conversation. I'm going to post the links to the proposed terms of, use changes and the top page to continue this feedback. And to pass it out to the communities. It is important to, not only be Anglophone conversation. So please also pass to the French community, to the Spanish community, to the Catalan community. I think someone mentioned the German community as well. and to give a really comprehensive feedback. So yes, thank you, [WMF Legal Team member]. Thank you [WMF Legal Team member] for your time.
WMF Legal team: Thank you, [WMF Facilitator]. Thanks for being masters of ceremony.
WMF Facilitator: Yes. And thank you [WMF Facilitator] for taking notes. We're going to compile these things and documenting on Meta.
WMF Legal team: Awesome.
WMF Facilitator: Yeah, thank you and have a good day. Good afternoon. Good night.
WMF Legal team: Yeah, thank you everyone for coming today.